The shore house, the soaring A-line or cozy bungalow, the one I may never have no matter how much I love the water, love to wake in the morning to a slate sky and sound of gulls, love to smell the ocean, feel the repetition of the tide buck the shore, see the white waves fall at my feet and retreat like one defeated. 

I would love a piece of the shore like those who head for the ocean as soon as the sun burns strong or school is out for summer. I thought this lack, this failing, was mine but no, I’ve learned it was by design. Long before I was born, the first suburbs were populated with rows of houses that all looked the same. Like a father willing to love only one of his children, they were government-backed and for whites only. Those who couldn’t buy homes, couldn’t move out of city tenements and projects for decades, were darker soldiers whose blood was somehow not as red, whose wounds were somehow not as precious, men who had answered Sam’s call to fight in another of America’s wars only to come home and give way in the streets, to be called boy and worse, to be beaten—even shot. The terror of Black men trained to defend themselves, trained to defeat an enemy—Black men with shoulders back when America no longer had need of Black men with straight backs. Their service afforded them fewer benefits than white soldiers. 

Covenants, restricted deeds, red lines and federal laws left those men and their families behind for generations. Rent receipts would earn them no equity to send their children to college or retire or put something down on a shore house to some day wake in the morning to the smell of the ocean, the repetition of the tide, to see the foam-topped waves kiss the beach and retreat like the enemy they once defeated.